U.S. and its allies winning against ISIS, says Obama's top adviser

U.S. President Barack Obama's top counter-terrorism adviser Lisa Monaco has said that the Washington and its allies are winning against the Islamic State (ISIS), adding the incoming Donald Trump administration needs to guard against the possibility of terrorism during the early part of the government.

Monaco oversees a team of some 50 senior directors and other officials at the White House who are focused on counter-terrorism, cyber security and homeland security.

Monaco in an interview to CNN gave her assessment of the war against ISIS, threats posed by al-Qaeda's affiliate in Syria, about what the next administration needs to worry the most including the possibility of a terrorist attack early in the Trump presidency.

 

Disagreeing with the claims that ISIS is winning, she said, "What has distinguished ISIL (another acronym for ISIS) is that it has operated as a hybrid threat -- an insurgent army; a terror group, directing attacks like we saw in Paris and in Brussels; and as a social phenomenon, using social media to spew venom. On all three dimensions, ISIL is absolutely losing. They're being rolled back from territory that they used to occupy in Iraq and Syria, losing some 50 percent of the territory that they used to occupy. As a terrorist group, they're on the run."

"The Defense Department has taken down a number of very senior leaders. And, in the social media space and in the messaging space, we have retooled our approach, whether it's with our counter-messaging tools or by engaging with the private sector," she added.

Asserting that companies like Twitter have really scaled up their actions to stop the ISIL from exploiting and abusing their platforms, Monaco said some 3,60,000 terrorist accounts have been disrupted and taken down over the last year and a half which is 1,000 accounts per day.

She said that new and innovative ideas are being placed by Google by which it redirects those who are searching for ISIL content to other content. "So I think we've got them on the run, for sure," Monaco said.